Fedora 11: Recent X.org/Intel 965 Update Breakage

Those who have compiz (“Desktop Effects”) enabled on 965 GPUs should be very wary of today’s xorg-x11-server-1.6.3-4.fc11 (FEDORA-2009-8766) update. For some reason or another, it makes Compiz prone to crashing when starting up. The solution to this is to revert to 1.4.3-3, or to temporarily disable Compiz. The latter can be done by changing the GConf entry. Switch to a virtual terminal from the GDM login screen by pressing Ctrl + Alt + F2, then login and run the following command:

Again, this does not actually fix the problem in the Xorg/Compiz stack. It instead disables Compiz entirely (reverting to Metacity – the default GNOME window manager).

This will workaround the bug until it can be solved properly. Note that any attempt to re-enable Compiz once logged in will also recreate this crash. So, it’s best to just leave it off until this is fixed.

In a weird way, this is kind of a Good Thing. Kwin desktop effects have been a little unstable for a while now. But not so unstable I’ve been able to file anything approaching a lucid bug report (and the crash manager just taunts me that the auto-generated report isn’t useful).

My point is, maybe whatever’s going on is now well-exposed enough that it can be fixed.